Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

HashiCorp Vault is an increasingly popular multi-cloud security tool that allows users to authenticate and access different clouds, systems, and endpoints, and centrally store, access, and deploy secrets. At Grafana Labs, we’re always looking for ways to make it easy for our community to get started monitoring important parts of their systems. So we’re happy to share some new integrations that will help our users get the most out of Grafana + Vault.

September and October were relatively quiet, so I thought I would write a single article for both months. While I'd normally try to write at least one useful article per month for OnlineOrNot's audience (as well as an update on how the business is going), I wrote no articles, and no code, actually. Instead, I packed up my life in Sydney, Australia, escaped lockdown, and relocated to France with my wife, and just enjoyed living for a while.

To give you enough notice to fix an issue before it escalates, we’re evolving our alerts and making them more proactive with Change and Crash Rate Alerts. So when your application experiences a change from the norm or a dip in crash-free sessions, Sentry will (smartly) alert you via Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, or old-fashioned email.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this October. We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

In the first part, I outlined some of the terms associated with the delivery of IoT. Next, let’s look at how this gets complex. You will need to read the state of each sensor (through their appropriate API and through their appropriate vendor-supplied hub), create logic to determine what actions must be taken when certain conditions are met, and then deliver these as a workflow to each responder, and confirm through data collected from sensors that the requested change was implemented.

In this blog post, I will be talking about label standard and best practices for Kubernetes security. This is a common area where I see organizations struggle to define the set of labels required to meet their security requirements. My advice is to always start with a hierarchical security design that is capable of achieving your enterprise security and compliance requirements, then define your label standard in alignment with your design.

One of the easier ways to improve the performance of your SQL Server and Azure SQL database queries is to ensure you choose the right data types for your data, and the data types in your application’s code match the ones in your stored procedures and queries. Choosing the right data type conserves space, because doing something like choosing a variable character type for data of fixed, regular length like a phone number or national ID number is wasteful.

Today we are announcing an additional $29 million in funding to help Lumigo grow and provide the same powerful observability capabilities we brought to serverless to other cloud-native technologies, including containers and Kubernetes. Lumigo was founded by Aviad Mor and me a few years ago because we believed the world would be rapidly moving to cloud-native architectures and that these technologies are transformative. Our goal was to create the tools that help developers realize this vision.

The best way to be sure that you keep a secret is not to know it in the first place. Managing secrets is a notoriously difficult engineering problem. Across our industry, secrets are stored in a bewildering variety of secure (and sometimes notoriously insecure) systems of varying complexity. Engineers are often trying to balance the least worst set of tradeoffs. At Honeycomb, we asked: What if we didn’t need to know your secrets to begin with?

Databases have always been the backbone of applications – both web and enterprise. Now, more than ever before, you need to know not just overall statistics about your database, but you must identify how database performance interacts with the network, operating system, servers, configuration, and even third party dependencies.